Coronavirus Concern Up

[Britesea]

This story is absolutely shameful. That hospitals have to act like smugglers to get needed supplies

Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism’

WASHINGTON (AP) — What if the real “invisible enemy” is the enemy from within — America's very institutions?

apnews.com

 

[Sassafras II]

Some people are probably just trying to make the public panic. The sec of ag was talking about this last week I think at one of the press briefings. It's not that we don't have enough food, the logistics have to be redone. They used to ship bulk food to restaurants, now they have to ship it to stores. (I hope this makes sense I like to link sites and not try to write it myself..I never did well in English)

 

[BarredBuff]

Some people are probably just trying to make the public panic. The sec of ag was talking about this last week I think at one of the press briefings. It's not that we don't have enough food, the logistics have to be redone. They used to ship bulk food to restaurants, now they have to ship it to stores. (I hope this makes sense I like to link sites and not try to write it myself..I never did well in English)

It's a little more than that with livestock. These companies (for hogs, dairy, and poultry) contract with farmers and they cannot sell to other processors. If the processing plant is shut--- it can slow down the product's arrival to the store shelves. Farmers cannot afford to feed them, or house them. In some cases, they can't even sell them to anyone else. Which causes the euthanasia. Right now, we have the supply, but if processors are shutdown for a few more weeks then the future supply will be cut drastically.

 

[Sassafras II]

Breaking: Trump to Order Meat Processing Plants to Stay Open as 'Critical Infrastructure'

www.redstate.com

 

[BarredBuff]

How the COVID-19 pandemic is sending American agriculture into chaos

COVID-19 is disrupting agriculture on many levels. The Trump administration recently announced it will spend $19 billion to help farmers. But they aren’t the only group in need of support -- undocumented immigrants are roughly half of American farmworkers, and they have been excluded from the...

www.pbs.org

 

[Daisy]

Pretty much back to usual life here. With more business in town than I have ever seen. Seeding on the farms will have started or not far off. Restrictions are easing with meetings of 10 people permitted again.

The regions are still closed so my shopping trip the city the other day was lovely. Probably the quietest Anzac weekend that city has ever seen. Its just a beautiful clean place when it's not swarming with tourists, but I bet some of the coffee shops are suffering as their biggest weekend of the year was closed. People were out and about enjoying the sunshine. Beaches were never shut here and we were always permitted to be out to exercise as long as we were distancing. It was really nice to see so many locals out and enjoying a weekend that is usually packed full with tourists.

Everything was available on the shelves in Coles but prices are high and there are no specials. They are saying the price hikes are a combination of bush fires and covid 19. I need to re-access my diet again. I am looking forward to the second hand and tip shops being allowed to open again so I can get some winter clothes and fencing supplies.

Covid 19 hasnt been the top story in our news for a week or so. It is odd to come online and see increasing panic when it has decreased so much where I am. I duno what winter will look like but those in charge here seem to know what they are doing so I'll listen to them.

 

[Lazy Gardener]

We went to the grocery store today. I would say that inventory was down about 50%. Paper products: Nada. Dairy down. Meat cases had big empty sections. Veggies: canned, frozen less than 1/4 stocked. Fresh produce was better stocked. Bread products, about 1/2 stocked. Beans, pasta, rice, flour... nope... none of that. There is no way that you could plan a meal, then go shopping for the ingredients. Now, you better go shopping, see what you can find, then plan a meal. Still fighting with pharmacy to get hubby's meds when they should be refilled.

 

[CrealCritter]

Well I have not looked at this thread for.a while and only trolled the recent posts. Sad to see, It looks like it's back to opinion based bashing on the presidency again. Should I post an opinion piece to counter Irish Times? How would that go over? Why is there only a like button, what if I or someone else dislikes a post?

 

[CrealCritter]

Wow. so... here come the outbreaks. Did anyone notice USA hit the mark of 1 million confirmed cases.


his Irish Times article should be read by every last person in this country. It’s behind a paywall, so here it is in full:

Read it and weep, my fellow Americans.
From the Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

 

[baymule]

Haha, we have to agree to disagree and move on. There is no group of people that ALL gets along ALL the time. Smooth your ruffled feathers out and have a nice juicy June bug snack.